


Through the Mountains

by melannen



Category: Secret Tunnel (Folksong)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-11
Updated: 2014-03-11
Packaged: 2018-01-15 09:15:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1299640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melannen/pseuds/melannen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After they died.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through the Mountains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cnoocy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cnoocy/gifts).



The old woman opened the skin of radish wine and offered it to the woman who sat beside her. "Oma wanted to be buried beside him," she said. "It was her only wish, in her last days. I've come to ask that boon of you, that you would allow her to rest in your burying-ground." 

The old woman was Oma's mother, and they sat on a smooth stone bench halfway across a mountain pass. She had come from one side of the mountain. The other woman was from the village on the other side of the mountain. She was Shu's mother. Shu had been Oma's lover, and he was only three years dead himself. The villages on the two sides of the mountain had been at war, until Oma stopped them in her grief for Shu. The two women were being very careful with each other, because a new peace is often more dangerous than war, and a woman's grief is more dangerous than either. They both still wore their hair in mourning knots for their children. They had lost their husbands to the war long ago.

Now Shu's mother held the wineskin and said, "I am so sorry for your loss. None of us expected this, and so soon!"

"It was the fever that came up from the plains," Shu's mother said. "All of her power to bend rock could not stop a fever the way it could a war. And I think - I think she did not fight it as hard as she could. I think she wanted to be with Shu again. At least-- I want to think that." She closed her eyes, and took a deep breath, with a sob in it. "Please," she said. "Please. It's not an easy thing to ask. I would keep her with us if I could. I know your leaders may see it as an insult, think that we are trying to take over your sacred ground, and I do not want to risk the peace, and so I came to you first, but - please. If there is any friendship between us yet, please." She did not reach out to touch the other woman, though they had played together, once, in their shared girlhood before the war. But her hands were twisted tightly to the cloth of her tunic.

Shu's mother's hands were pressed flat against the cold stone of the bench, the wineskin forgotten. "I would give you this if I could," she said, "though I had to fight all of my people for the right. But I don't know where my son is buried." She smiled sharply. "Your daughter took him away, on the day she stopped the war. She took him into the mountain."

Oma's mother stood and looked behind her, at the sheer wall of rock that rose above them. The two villages had always hated and feared the mountain. It was the realm of the great badger-moles, who had some sort of strange power over the rock, and the ground would shift dangerously and unpredictably under one's feet. At night, the wolf-bats poured out of cracks and crevices in the rocks, ready to devour anyone unwary enough to venture out into the unprotected dark. Storms swept the high peaks and brought dust-storms to one of the villages, and floods to the other.

They kept the one pass clear, but only at that. Long ago, the two villages had worked together to keep the pass clear, sending out teams of men to laboriously undo the badgermoles' work and send fire into the wolfbats' lairs; and then the war had its own ways.

With Oma's teachings they kept the pass clear with the badgermoles' own power, both villages together. But they still hated and feared the mountain. They feared the rock-bending, too. They had come to it as destruction beyond imagining, as Oma poured out her anger and grief on their armies together. Oma's mother had been the first to learn from her. She was one of the most skilled. Every day, to honor her daughter's memory, she would practice making a cooking-pot of rock, or breaking and then repairing her thresh-hold stone, but unless there was great need, she did no more than that.

Now she stood in front of that sheer wall of rock, and said "If she took him into the mountain, then I will go into the mountain and find him."

Shu's mother stood up and stood beside her, and said, "If you go, I will go with you." And now she did reach out, and they stood in front of the mountain, hand clasped in hand.


End file.
